What Caitlin Moran is reading during the lockdown

A list of books and podcasts, from guaranteed laughs to feminist polemics, from the author of 'How to Build A Girl'.

Caitlin Moran

02 April 2020

I thought I’d share some recommendations to pass the time in lock-down, as so many people (four)have suggested I should, and I’d clutter up Twitter forever if I tweeted all of this.

Books

Of course, you already have Hilary Mantel’sThe Mirror & The Light - the concluding part of her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, which I will personally be enraged if it doesn’t see her nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Quick question to those reading it: have you, too, got terrible wrist-strain from holding a 800-page book for hours at a time? I suspect we will see the syndrome “Mantel tendonitis” trending over the next few weeks.

Simon Rich has written a variety of collections of short-stories, all of which are so economically droll, they read like masterclasses. His masterpiece is the novella The Sell Out,about how Rich’s great-great-grandfather, a Jewish immigrant, fell into a pickle-barrel in New York in 1920, and then emerges a hundred years later in hipster Brooklyn - only to be alternately confused and enraged by his solipsistic, neurotic great-great-grandson, Rich. It’s like a non-problematic Woody Allen for the 21st century.

I hope some of these suggestions might bring you some moments of escape while we beat The Awfulness together

And although it’s technically a childrens’ book, E. Nesbit’s The Story Of The Treasure Seekersstill has the best unreliable narrator in history: Oswald Bastable tells the story of how he and his siblings tried to seek their newly poor family’s 'fortune' during one long, English summer. His conceit is that you aren’t supposed to know he is the narrator - 'It is one of us that tells this story – but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess - only I bet you don’t.' The fact that nearly every page contains some anecdote about how heroic and noble Oswald is, and how everyone else is a clod or an idiot, is still funny 250 pages later.

If you’re in more of a non-fiction mood, then Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Womenis a game-changing piece of research: gathering together, for the first time, all the information on the 'data gap' on how sex affects almost every aspect of our lives. The symptoms of heart attack are different for women than men! Public transport systems are designed for male commuters - not women dropping off kids, caring for relatives, then going to the shops! New drugs tend not to be tested on women - because our hormones 'complicate' things! All the reasons why it often feels so much more difficult to be a woman are explained here, and written up in such an engagingly breezy, yet slightly furious, manner, that you’ll find yourself quoting it endlessly to friends. A properly enlightening book.

Continuing in a feminist vibe - as I have for the past 45 years - Helen Lewis’s Difficult Womenis a history of feminism told through eleven fights conducted by the titular 'difficult women'. Marriage, abortion, worker’s rights - we have all gained from the efforts of these women who weren’t simple and saintly enough to be officially sanctified as feminist heroes, and are all the more relatable for it. Like Criado-Perez, Lewis is an author you just enjoy hanging out with on the page, as she tells you all she’s discovered.

While you’re having your One Walk A Day, if you want a podcast to distract you from the fact you’ve been up and down the street 400 times already, Vicki Pepperdine and Julia Davis’s Dear Joan And Jerichais disgustingly brilliant: as two hateful agony aunts, they dismiss every problem their 'listeners' come up with whilst breaking records for filth. The reverie about one listener’s sexy nephew, having a shower in a caravan, is appalling, and I mean that in a good way.

If you fancy something a bit more euridite, the This Jungian Life is a conversational deep-dive into Jungian theory which is properly enlightening about the collective unconscious. The one about secrets had me chewing over various aspects for days: not least for the revelation that, during our teenage years, we need to be a secret to others, whilst we quietly form ourselves. “That’s the whole closing monologue to How To Build A Girl!” I shouted, in the middle of an empty street, with my headphones one. “I wrote a Jungian coming-of-age movie! Unconsciously! How Jungian is that!”

I hope some of these suggestions might bring you some moments of escape while we beat The Awfulness together, by staying in. It’s not as good as normal life, but it’s better than the usual global wars.